Time To Face Up To Issues

Time To Face Up To Issues

Last year, towards the ANC (African National Congress) Polokwane conference, I wrote in the Mail and Guardian a piece [The Media is no innocent messenger] on the need for our media to engage with ANC conference documents. To its credit the Mail and Guardian subsequently established a column titled Polokwane Briefing to give platform to that. The debate was mostly vigorous, if at times a little dull. It offered readers opportunity to make up their own minds about the issues, something very rare in South African manipulative media.

Now that pessimism is a prevailing mood in our country, especially concerning racial issues, like in the late eighties, perhaps it is time we establish another public platform to revisit the foundations of our so called Rainbow Nation. We could talk about many things, like trying to shed some light on matters of moral character in public office. But I would suggest we commence with our scourge, racism.

We’ve to investigate the retrogressive aspects of our time that has given confidence to the plague of racism to asperse our reconciliatory efforts. We all know the Rainbow Nation notion has never really had much substance in our racial charged society. For a moment, when Mandela was in the helm of power, it gave us a monkey branch to hide so as to gain confidence to strive away from reality through wishful thinking. Now reality has return with vengeance. Our news is contaminated with racial incidences, and the manner by which we comment on them betrays our still prejudiced mental frames.

The truth of the matter is that most white South Africans are in denial about racism, just as most blacks are in resentment. The cataclysmic manner by which the ruling party (ANC) ousted its president, Thabo Mbeki, for the controversial figure, JZ (Jacob Zuma) gave confidence to opposition parties that all might not be quiet within the ANC front; that it might not be vulnerable on the next elections. It also gave colour to irresponsible speculations of the Cassandras, especially in our media that mostly pander to the thralls of mocking infamy towards the ruling party. The coterie of their commentators, whose use of facts mostly amounts to innuendo against the government—not half bad when not subject to suspicious motives—went on over drive.

The Weltanschauung of the media in SA (South Africa) is liberal media, a good thing under normal circumstances. But in SA liberal does not necessary mean mean non partisan free debate in the media. It means, more or else, secret appendage of, and patronage machine for the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance with designs of conscious manipulation of our organised habits and opinions to harness to haughty pretensions of subtle racism in the name of enlightenment. It is little more than superlative, hackish, uninspired, repetitive and depthless hauteur of hand-me-down pseudo liberal kitsch pretending to champion values of humanity and freedom. That on its own would be tolerable if it were not done with such nauseating degree of manipulation and news selection designed to subvert other point of views.

Another problem with South African version of liberalism is undercurrents of colonial crapulosities. South African liberal commentary mostly has what Edward Said in his 1978 book, Orientalism, termed Western essentialisation of Arab world. Substitute Africa for Arab and you get similar modes of discourse bound up with impositions of imperial power. Only the New Imperialism instead of wishing to civilise the natives, aims at ‘enlightening’ them into the so called humanism. This reification of imperialist mentality strives, this time, for dominance, not by creating an Empire, by through linguistic hegemony and condescending liberal mantra.

The New Imperialism is supported by some high-minded black pests and wannabe epicurean exploiters—the so called foot-lickers—who pour black skin on white prejudices on mistaken idea that it made them enlightened. They too use knowledge as powering disguise for subversive tendencies in the name of freedom of expression and such nauseating never tiring tendencies of cry wolf fingering pointed at failing African states.

There’s also a boomlet of Pan Africanist tendencies aiming to crown their own version of hegemony, but their designs are obvious and clumsy, less subtle, for everyone to see; so no need to go into depth about here.

From all this the South African chattering class finds itself increasingly living in an era of enclaves and niches, squelched by diversity and suspicious of the other. Hence, I say, the establishment of an aseptic public platform may assist in ironing out these issues. Weary as we maybe of these convocations they’re means to introduce our respective points of views when conducted in frank honest manner. It is time SA grooms its coat of many colours so as to pass it to the next generation with lesser fleas.